= Supporting other translation formats =

The standing policy is to add no significantly new file formats unless there is a very good reason.  It may seem simple, but often there are subtle snags.


== Qt's “ts” format ==

Requested in May 2012 by David Planella and Olivier Tilloy.  We decided not to implement this, and continue with conversions to gettext, because of the way [[http://qt-project.org/doc/linguist-programmers.html#handling-plural-forms|plural forms]] work in ts.

From Jeroen Vermeulen's email:

«In gettext, a message with a singular & plural gets two strings in the
template. In ts, it gets just one string in the template and then you
need to provide an English translation that does have a plural.

«Technically we can support formats with “English translations” rather
than “English templates,” sort of, since we had to do that for XPI. But
it's a massive pain in all sorts of ways, with special code paths and
accepted breakage. And in its current form it won't combine with
plural-forms handling; we'd have to do some nasty stuff to make that
work in the data model.

«(Also, ts plurals support seems to use a custom “%n” specifier which
gettext validation would misinterpret. To handle this gracefully we'd
have to modify the string's database representation.)»